UCR ARTS: California Museum of Photography
Curated by Douglas McCulloh
Lies are ever-present in human affairs, a tidal flow that rises and falls. Recently, lies have been at flood stage and photographs are central to the surge.
Statements, strings of words, are readily seen as assertions, claims. Photographs, on the other hand, are presumed to be a form of evidence. In Susan Sontag’s phrase, we assume photographs are “directly stenciled off the real.” Consequently, photographs, even dubious ones, carry credence in a way that words do not. Moreover, writes theorist Lev Manovich, “the reason we think that computer graphics technology has succeeded in faking reality is that we, over the course of the last hundred and fifty years, have come to accept the image of photography and film as reality.” For these main reasons and scores of lesser ones, photographs are ideal vehicles for lies. (Read More)
Manufactured images are wholesale fabrications. They are photographic spontaneous combustion: fire out of nothing. Manufactured images range from vaguely photorealistic digital illustrations to wholly convincing deepfakes. With the rise of computing power, manufactured images bloom like unnatural flowers in a hothouse. The earliest creators of Artificial Intelligence dreamed of replicating and expanding the marvels of the human mind. Deepfakes are AI bent to the purpose of lying and lying in the most convincing way possible. But manufactured images can also be created through simple old-fashioned staging, what photohistorians call “fabricating to photograph.”
“Once we came to accept the photographic image as reality, the way to its future simulation was open.”
—Lev Manovich, artist, writer, theorist, 1960– )
“…the photograph that has become digital [is] liberated at a single stroke from both the negative and the real world.”
—Jean Baudrillard, (writer and theorist, 1929–2007)
“We are finally living in Plato’s cave, if we consider how those who were imprisoned within the cave—who could do nothing but watch those shadows passing on the back wall—were convinced that those shadows were their one and only reality. I see a profound similarity to all this in the epoch we’re now living in. We no longer live simply through images: we live through images that don’t even exist, which are the result not of physical projection but of pure virtuality.”
—José Saramago, (writer, 1922–2010)
“The notion of the real and the fake has come full circle. We now tend to dismiss the real because it looks like a fake. The ‘truth’ is that in their own way, when all is said and done, all fakes and surrogates also become their own sort of original.”
—Pedro Meyer, (photographer, 1935– )
“You can do anything you like, it’s all fiction.”
—John Gossage, (photographer, 1946– )
“Photographs attract false beliefs the way flypaper attracts flies.”
—Errol Morris, (filmmaker, 1948- )
“It’s not that we mistake photographs for reality; we prefer them to reality.”
—David Levi Strauss, (writer and critic, 1953– )